The urban practice of
skateboarding has become in the last decade a global phenomenon, with around 20-40 million
dedicated practitioners dispersed through just about every modern city worldwide. The
centre of it all remains, however, the USA, with new centres like Philadelphia, Chicago
New York and San Francisco joining Los Angeles as major concentrations of skate activity.

Vilified alternatively as a
children's play-thing or as an urban crime, skateboarding in fact represents a totalising
urban subculture, complete with its own graphic design, language, music and codes of
behaviour. This subculture rejects work, the family and normative American values in
favour of new relations which transcend geographic, class and race boundaries to posit a
brotherhood of masculine identity. But for skateboarders to produce themselves in this
way, their activity must take place in the streets of the city. Its representational mode
isnot that of writing, drawing or theorising, but of performing - of speaking their
meanings and critiques of the city through their urban actions. Here in the movement of
the body across urban space, and in its direct interaction with the modern architecture of
the city, lies the central critique of skateboarding - a rejection both of the values and
of the spatio-temporal modes of living in the contemporary capitalist city.

A
Performative Critique of the American City: the Urban Practice of Skateboarding, 1958-1998

Surely it is the supreme
illusion to defer to architects, urbanists or planners as being experts or ultimate
authorities in matters relating to space. (1)

Lefebvres attitude toward
space has come to be widely held across different disciplines and discourses. Architects
and planners may be the functionaries and ideologists of urban space, but their schema and
drawings, their buildings and planned spaces, do not themselves constitute urban space.
Rather, urban space is a continual reproduction, involving not just material objects and
practices, not just codified texts and representations, but also imaginations and
experiences of space.

What I want to do in this paper
is to explore a particular kind of urban space production, one which utilises the objects
and spaces of the city, but which does itself produce any objectival thing. In particular,
I want to focus on the compositional and representational mode of skateboarding, to
consider how it represents the city without maps, and how it speaks
something of the city, without recourse to theory or texts.

From Surf to Streets

Skateboarding began in the
beach cities of California, first in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s as a
surfers activity, emulating the surf moves on the hard surfaces of urban
subdivisions and rolling tarmac.

By the mid 1970s skaters had
located a variety of what I call found terrains, on which they further extended their
surf-related moves. These ranged from schoolyard banks, such as those at Kenter School in
the Brentwood area of LA, to drainage ditches, such as Stoker Hill, to concrete pipes
found out in the desert. Most importantly of all, skaters discovered that once drained of
water, the round, keyhole or kidney shaped swimming pools favoured in many of the more
moneyed LA residences offered a curved transition from floor to wall. Skaters carved up
the walls, explored the limits of the tile and coping, and even the space beyond the wall
with "aerial" moves in which the skater

In the late 1970s, such moves
became even more dramatic in the new skateparks  purpose-built, commercial
facilities built all over the US, UK and other countries worldwide. Such skateparks
typically offered a range of elements, including dramatically exaggerated pools, replete
with tiles and coping  some of the most famous include the skatepark at Marina del
Rey (Los Angeles) and "Pipeline) (Uplands, Los Angeles) in the USA and "The
Rom" (Romford) and "Solid Surf" (Harrow) in the UK.

But from the early 1980s
onward, skateboarding has increasingly gone back to the streets, not to so much to the
suburban drives of California but to the inner city cores of other cities worldwide. The
urban practice of skateboarding has become a global phenomenon, with I estimate around
20-40 million dedicated practitioners dispersed through just about every modern city
worldwide. The centre of it all remains, however, the USA, with new centres like
Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and San Francisco joining Los Angeles as major
concentrations of skate activity. Here, in the modernist city, skaters ride on to the
walls, benches, ledges, railings, fire hydrants and other paraphernalia of the urban
street.

There is also a social and
cultural dimension to this, for skateboarding in fact represents a totalising urban
subculture, complete with its own graphic design, language, music, magazines, junk food
and codes of behaviour. It postulates certain attitudes towards matters of gender
relations, race, sexuality and masculinity. Above all, this is a subculture which rejects
work, the family and normative American values. As one American skater put it,

Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie,
weed, beer, pills, needles, alcohol etc., etc., are all typical hobbies of all the typical
people in all the typical states in the typical country of the United States of Amerika [.
. .] Why be a clone? Why be typical? (2)

This is a totalising
subculture, in which partial allegiance is to miss the point and which ultimately presents
the skater with a single binary choice: skate or be stupid.

Skateboarding thus brings
together a concern to live out an idealised present, trying to live outside of society
while being simultaneously within its very heart(3). But for skateboarders to produce
themselves in this way, their activity must take place in the streets of the city. Its
representational mode is not that of writing, drawing or theorising, but of performing
 of speaking their meanings and critiques of the city through their urban actions.
Here in the movement of the body across urban space, and in its direct interaction with
the modern architecture of the city, lies the central critique of skateboarding  a
rejection both of the values and of the spatio-temporal modes of living in the
contemporary capitalist city.

The skaters engagement
with the city is, in particular, a run across its terrains, with momentary settlings and
encounters with all manner of diverse objects and spaces: ledges, walls, hydrants, rails,
steps, benches, planters, bins, kerbs, banks and so on. In the words of Stacy Peralta,

[S]katers can exist on the
essentials of what is out there. Any terrain. For urban skaters the city is the hardware
on their trip (4).

In this sense, skaters see the
city as a set of objects. Yet cities are not things, but the apparent form of the
urbanisation process (5), and are in fact filled with ideas, culture and memories, with
flows of money, information and ideologies, and are dynamically constitutive of the
continual reproduction of the urban. To see the city as a collection of objects is
then to fail to see its real character. And this is exactly the failure one could say of
skateboarding, which does little or nothing to analyse the processes which form the
urban; instead, the phenomenal procedures of skateboarding rely entirely on the objectival
nature of the city, treating its surfaces  horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved
 as the physical ground on which to operate.

Yet within this failure lies a
profound critique of the city qua object-thing. Capitalism has replaced the city as
oeuvre  the unintentional and collective work of art, richly significant yet
embedded in everyday life (6)  with "repetitive spaces," "repetitive
gestures" and standardised things of all kinds to be exchanged and reproduced,
differentiated only by money (7). Skateboarding, however, at once accepts and denies this
presentation of cities as collections of repetitive things. On the one hand, skateboarders
accept it, by focusing purely on the phenomenal characteristics of architecture, on its
compositions of planes, surfaces and textures as accessible to the skateboarder.

Look around. Look at a world
full of skate shapes [. . .] shapes left there by architects for you to skate (8).

Here the city and its
architecture is undoubtedly a thing. On the other hand, it is also through this very focus
on the phenomenal that a change is made. When skateboarders ride along a wall, over a fire
hydrant or up a building, they are entirely indifferent to its function or ideological
content. They are therefore no longer even concerned with its presence as a building,
as a composition of spaces and materials logically disposed to create a coherent urban
entity. By focusing only on certain elements (ledges, walls, banks, rails) of the
building, skateboarders deny architectures existence as a discrete three-dimensional
indivisible thing, knowable only as a totality, and treat it instead as a set of floating,
detached, physical elements isolated from each other; where architects
considerations of building "users" (9) imply a quantification of the body
subordinate to space and design, the skaters performative body has, "the
ability to deal with a given set of pre-determined circumstances and to extract what you
want and to discard the rest."(10) Skateboarding reproduces architecture in its own
measure, re-editing it as series of surfaces, textures and micro-objects.

Buildings are building blocks
for the open minded (11).

Architecture (following here
Lefebvres body-centric formulations) "reproduces itself within those who use
the space in question, within their lived experience."(12) This occurs in
skateboarding through architecture being encountered in relation to height, tactility,
transition, slipperiness, roughness, damage to skin on touching, damage to body from a
fall, angle and verticality, sequencing, drops (stairs and ramps), kinks and shape
(hand-rails), profiles (edges), materials, lengths and so on. And only a very small part
of the architecture is used  the "building" for a skater only an extracted
edit of its total existence.

For example, a particular
English school in Ipswich is known by skaters not as a building or function, but for its
handrails.

[T]ravel to Ipswich and ask to
check out the school with the handrails, theyll know which one and its sick
(13).

Also in Ipswich, Suffolk
College was known primarily for its roof, stairs and ledges, a specific church was known
for the wooden benches outside, another school for some steps, and an entire us air base
for a single, yellow fire hydrant (14).

Similarly, on the other side of
the Atlantic, the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York, (1985

, architect John
Portman), and offering the usual Portman features of vast glass elevations, spectacular
atrium, rocket ship elevators and internal glitz (15), was reconceived by skaters as
"modern day skate architecture" and identified for its "tight
transitions," "black walls," street-level walkway and for its planters
(16). Similarly, New Yorks Museum of Natural History became "100
yards of Italian marble, marble benches curbed for frontside and backside rails, six
steps, and statues of famous dudes with marble bases [. . .] basically an awesome skate
arena."(17)

What ties these elements
together is neither compositional, structural, servicing or functional logic, but the
entirely separate logic composed from the skateboarders moving rapidly from one
building or urban element to another. Such "strategies embracing
architecture"(18) select what in design-architectural terms are a discontinuous
series of walls, surfaces, steps and boundaries, but which in skateboardings
space-time become a flow of encounters and engagements between board, body and terrain.

Find it. Grind it. Leave it
behind (19).

Skateboarding here resists the
standardisation and repetition of the city as a serial production of building types,
functions and discrete objects; it decentres building-objects in time and space in order
to recompose them as a strung-out yet newly synchronous arrangement. Thus while many
conceive of cities as comprehensive urban plans, monuments or grands projets,
skateboarding suggests that cities can be thought of as series of micro-spaces.
Consequently, architecture is seen to lie beyond the province of the architect and is
thrown instead into the turbulent nexus of reproduction (20).

On the street the urban blight
is being reworked to new specifications. The man on the avenue is the architect of the
future. [. . .] There are now no formalized plans. Invent your own life (21).

Through such compositions,
skateboarding brings back that which strictly economistic Marxism evacuates  it
brings back the dream, imaginary and "poetic being,"(22) what one skater called
the "skate of the art."(23) Skateboarding points to the resurrection of the
urban not as a product, but as a way of living.

Performing Cities

Skateboarding is, then, at one
level an aesthetic rather than ethical practice, using the "formants" at its
disposal to create an alternative reality (24). Skateboarders analyse architecture not for
historical, symbolic or authorial content but for how surfaces present themselves as
skateable surfaces. This is what Thrasher skateboard magazine calls the
"skaters eye:"

People who ride skateboards
look at the world in a very different way. Angles, spots, lurkers and cops all dot the
landscape that we all travel (25).

How then does this aesthetic
activity take place? What techniques or modes of representation are involved?

As already noted, skateboarders
undertake a discontinuous edit of architecture and urban space, recomposing their own city
from different places, locations, urban elements, routes and times. The city for the
skateboarder becomes a kind of capriccio, the tourists postcard where various
architectural sites are compressed into an irrational (in time and space) view,(26) except
the editing tool is here not eye, camera or tourist coach but motile body.

One effect of this is that a
different kind of canon of city architecture is drawn up  substituting everyday
architecture for great monuments and buildings by famous architects. The city for
skateboarders is not buildings but a set of ledges, window sills, walls, roofs, railings,
porches, steps, salt bins, fire hydrants, bus benches, water tanks, newspaper stands,
pavements, planters, kerbs, handrails, barriers, fences, banks, skips, posts, tables and
so on "To us these things are more."(27) New York, for example, is for skaters
not the New York of the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, nd Street, Central Park and
Chrysler Building, but of the Bear Stearns Building (46th and 47th, Park and Lexington),
"Bubble banks" (south side of 747 3rd Avenue), "Harlem banks" (Malcolm
x Avenue and 139th), "Brooklyn banks" (Manhattan end of Brooklyn Bridge),
Washington Square Park, Mullaly Park in Brooklyn, Marriott Marquis Hotel (45th and
Broadway), Bell Plaza banks etc.(28) Washington, by the same process, became known
architecturally to skaters as Pulaski Park, National Geographic Building, Federal Welfare
Archives, Georgetown School banks, "Gold Rail" and "White Steps."(29)
Other cities receive the same treatment; Tokyo, for example, becomes Akihabara Park,
"jabu jabu" banks in Shinjuku, ledges at Tokyo Station, curbs at Yotsuya
Station, banks at Tokyo Taikan and so on.

What is the mode involved in
such a recomposition? Occasionally, this takes the form of a map or geographic list, such
as alternative routes through Bristol (30) or the Knowhere internet site, where
nearly every skate location in the uk is identified. (31) But more usually a more
localised kind of mapping takes place. Skate magazines in the 1990s, have tended to focus
less on professional skaters, major cities and well-known skate places and more on local
skate scenes  the "streets and back yards of Anytown" (32)  like
those in Oxted, Ipswich, Oxford, Milton Keynes, High Wycombe, Stroud, Cirencester and
Cardiff; in the us, a single issue of Slap, for example, covered not just la (the
oldest centre of skateboarding) but also places like Sacramento (California), Fort
Lauderdale (Florida) and the urban backwaters of Nevada, Utah, Iowa, Kentucky,
Connecticut, and New Jersey. (33) In such articles, the reader-skater finds descriptions
of local banks, rails, curbs etc., not just to encourage a visit, but to generally
demonstrate that such locations are to be found in all urban centres, and so available to
all urban skaters.

Here are more pictures of
Everyman skating in Everytown. It could be your town. It could be you (34)

This is a communication which
engenders empathy and similarity between towns and skaters, not a spectacularised Other of
terrain and personalities.

In their own locality,
therefore, the skateboarders cognitive representation is neither map nor directory,
for skateboarding is "hard to put onto paper," (35) nor of a spectacularised
centre-point, but a mental knowledge composed of highly detailed local knowledge about
dispersed places, micro-architectures and accessible times.

always be on the alert for a
possible spot [. . .] Be alert [. . .] keep your eyes open and your head oscillating (36).

Skaters representations
thus have more in common with the Situationist tactics of the dérive, détournement
and psychogeography  "maps" composed from the opportunities offered by the
physical and emotional contours of the city, and, above all, enacted through a run across
different spaces and moments (37).

Im directed most to
movements, the way I travel, the directions I move in. I follow my feelings (38).

Skating is a continual search
for the unknown (39).

Skateboarders
representational maps are thus always situated through a continual re-living of the
city  "an open mind always seeking out new lines and possibilities." (40)
Skaters attempt neither to "see" the city or comprehend it as a totality, but to
live it as simultaneously representation and physicality.

Walls arent just walls,
banks arent just banks, curbs arent just curbs and so on [. . .] mapping
cities out in your head according to the distribution of blocks and stairs, twisting the
meaning of your environment around to fit your own needs and imagination. Its
brilliant being a skateboarder isnt it? (41).

Another distinction from
conventional maps concerns temporality. In the aerial form of map, the entire city is
understood simultaneously within a single glance  but in skateboarders
cognitive mapping the time is that of the run, composed of a disparate objects in a
sequence (linear time), with some objects "read" once (isolated time), others
encountered several times (repeated time) and still others returned to again and again on
different occasions (cyclical time). The whole run can also be repeated the same or
differently (differential time). As one skater described the experience of skateboarding
among traffic:

Ridin from spot to spot,
at high speed, during rush hour is my version of the ultimate test for any urban
"street skater." On a good day, when all the stop lights are working in my
favour, I feel like Ive figured out where my place is in this fucked-up world. That
lasts for maybe a minute, then the feeling disappears and Im lost again. So it goes
(42).

Skateboarders are thus more
concerned with temporal distance as proximity (temporal closeness of things, temporal
locality), and its repetition, than with time as a valuable resource or measure of
efficiency; time for skaters is what is lived, experienced and produced, not what is
required.

Its about time, its
about space, its about time to skate someplace (43).

Another aspect of this sense of
adaptive temporality concerns memory and documentation, for the skateboarders is not
an historical but everyday memory, often surviving only for the period in which a set of
places are skated. Skateboarders thus negate the "historical" time of the city,
being wholly unconcerned with the many decades and processes of its construction, so that
the city appears out-of-the-blue with no temporal past. "Ive always lived for
the present. I live for the present."(44)

Nor is the city recorded
by skateboarders, but is that of the here-and-now, the immediate object, re-born each day
of the skaters run. "This isnt art, it isnt business, its
life." (45) Just, then, as skateboarders do not attempt to understand the city, nor
do they try to document it. Skateboarding leaves almost no text to be read; its marks and
assaults leave virtually no discernible script for others to translate and comprehend.
These kinds of marks are about the only "text" left by the activity of
skateboarding itself.

Skateboarding is, then, less a
mode of writing or drawing, and more a mode of speaking of the city  that
"speech doubling" (46) which at once interrogates and increases the meaning of
the city, while leaving its original text intact. Above all, speech requires the actual
presence of the subject, the active speaker of the city. Speaking-skateboarding is not a
mimicking of the city, an oration of a pre-given text, but a performative utterance
wherein the speaker forms anew themselves and the city.

The new urban strategist
realizes that while it may not pay to be different, no one can really afford the price of
being the same. In the new master plan, conformation has been replaced by confrontation.
Act, dont react, turn off the air conditioner go outside and move. (47)

It is, therefore, in the
continual performance of skateboarding that its meaning and actions are manifested; as one
skateboard maxim puts it, "shut up and skate." These are not things which can be
simply seen or understood through pure abstraction; like any socio-spatial rhythm,
skateboarding requires a multiplicity of senses, thoughts and activities to be represented
and comprehended. Above all, because the experiencer relates the fundamental conditions of
their own temporality to that of the world outside, they create a subject-object
engagement that is ultimately a lived form of dialectical thought. They produce themselves
bodily and socially, and they produce the city in terms of their own specific bodily
encounter with it.

NOT FOR CIRCULATION OR
DISTRIBUTION
WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF AUTHOR

Guy Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography," and "Theory
of the Dérive," Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology,
(Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), pp. 5-8 and 50-4.